Do your banking from home - but securely!

Because of the corona virus, the Fed­eral Council is rec­om­mending you stay at home if at all pos­sible. Thanks to e-banking, there is gen­er­ally not a problem with this. Some mat­ters how­ever require face-to-face con­tact with a cus­tomer con­sul­tant. Still, there are safe and secure alter­na­tives for this, too.

To con­tain the spread of the corona virus, the Swiss have been asked to not leave their homes if at all pos­sible. Many finan­cial trans­ac­tions, e. g. remit­tances, can be processed com­fort­ably and securely via e-banking. Some mat­ters how­ever need to be dis­cussed with your per­sonal point of con­tact at your bank. How can you achieve this both safely and securely?

In many cases, a tele­phone con­ver­sa­tion with your cus­tomer con­sul­tant is fea­sible and suf­fi­cient. In case there is a need how­ever to present doc­u­ments, such as con­tracts, or to explain some soft­ware, this might prove dif­fi­cult. To this end, banks are cur­rently some­times offering video con­fer­encing or remote sup­port ses­sions. Please note our tips on how to securely handle remote sup­port on this issue.

Increased cau­tion is called for in case of unex­pected e-mails, SMS or Mes­senger mes­sages or tele­phone calls - even if these seem to orig­i­nate from a person or com­pany you know. There are cur­rently some decep­tively authentic-looking phishing e-mails doing the rounds, pur­port­edly sent by a German bank, which ask cus­tomers to enter their con­tact details on a bogus web­site. The clo­sure of cer­tain bank branches is stated as the reason for sending these mails. Sim­ilar phishing attempts are also to be expected in the name of Swiss finan­cial institutions.

Crim­i­nals are gen­er­ally exploiting the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion involving the corona virus, some­times quite shamelessly:

• Bogus e-mails sent out in the name of the Bun­de­samt für Gesund­heit (BAG, Public Health Office) last week were meant to induce the recip­i­ents to install a piece of mal­ware sent in the annex, dis­guised as a harm­less doc­u­ment. This would have given the attacker total access to the victim’s PC.
• The very next day, fraud­sters, once again posing as the BAG, tried to obtain sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion with the help of tele­phone calls.
• Shortly after, e-mails emerged pur­porting to include a memo card on the spread of the corona virus, or an e-book on how to pro­tect your­self against it in the annex. In reality, this was a Trojan.
• Since the last week-end, ransom mails have been cir­cu­lating, with crim­i­nals threat­ening to infect the recip­ient with corona virus, since allegedly they know of his or her exact whereabouts.
• Last but not least, there is an increasing number of web shops offering hard to obtain prod­ucts such as pro­tec­tive masks for sale. Once paid, they don’t how­ever then deliver.

Pro­tect your­self against fraud­sters by treating all elec­tronic mes­sages with great cau­tion. Don’t open any annexes or links included in them, unless you are able to check on the sender’s authen­ticity for cer­tain first. And don’t entrust just any third party or unknown provider with your sen­si­tive data about your­self and your online access details, nei­ther via the Internet nor the telephone.

Infor­ma­tion on fur­ther pro­tec­tive mea­sures can also be found in our arti­cles on phishing and  fraud­u­lent sup­port calls.